Steely Women in a World of Wobbly Men

David Runciman: The Myth of the Strong Leader, 20 June 2019

... they won’t be another May. How to make that case? By frantically channelling their inner iron lady. ‘Dominic is the male Thatcher,’ Raab’s supporters will tell anyone who’ll listen. ‘Like Thatcher, he is “unyielding”,’ one former cabinet minister said. What this seems to mean is that he will keep hammering away until he gets his way. Raab ...

Bad Books

Susannah Clapp: The Trial of Edith Thompson, 4 August 1988

Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson 
by René Weis.
Hamish Hamilton, 327 pp., £14.95, July 1988, 0 241 12263 5
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... what they were not like. In page after page Edith Thompson examined the personalities of Lady Sarah Ides, Cesare Carelli or the Princess Mancelli with the ferocious attention of a Dallas fan. ‘About Dolores darlint – I dont agree with you at all about her not liking her husband’; ‘I didnt like Theo myself’; ‘I like Clarie – she is so ...

Banjaxed

Eleanor Birne: Jane Harris, 6 April 2006

The Observations 
by Jane Harris.
Faber, 415 pp., £12.99, April 2006, 0 571 22335 4
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... for work, arrives on foot at a grand house near Edinburgh, where she hopes to be taken on as a lady’s maid by Arabella, the smart English mistress of the estate. Here a clever thing happens. Ara-bella is about to dismiss Bessy as a potential servant – she has lied about her knowledge of farming – when a chance comment changes her mind. Bessy asks for ...

Masquerade

Gillian Bennett: Self-impersonation, 3 November 2005

The Woman who Pretended to Be who She Was: Myths of Self-Impersonation 
by Wendy Doniger.
Oxford, 272 pp., £17.99, January 2005, 0 19 516016 9
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... saintly mask made to fit his worldly face, by changing his name to George Heaven, and courting his lady all over again. When eventually unmasked, he finds that years of looking and behaving as a saint have transformed illusion into reality. ‘He looked into her eyes and saw in them the reflection of his own ...

Room for the Lambs

Elizabeth Spelman: Sexual equality, 26 January 2006

Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws 
by Catharine MacKinnon.
Harvard, 558 pp., £25.95, March 2005, 0 674 01540 1
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... about the making of the notorious and hugely profitable pornographic exploration of the lady with the lively larynx. MacKinnon has spent a good portion of her career as a scholar and litigator trying to develop legal and other sanctions against pornography – including having helped Deep Throat star Linda Boreman (Linda Lovelace was a nom de ...

Going Electric

Patrick McGuinness: J.H. Prynne, 7 September 2000

Poems 
by J.H. Prynne.
Bloodaxe/Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre, 440 pp., £25, March 2000, 1 85224 491 7
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Pearls that Were 
by J.H. Prynne.
Equipage, 28 pp., £4, March 1999, 1 900968 95 9
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Triodes 
by J.H. Prynne.
Barque, 42 pp., £4, December 1999, 9781903488010
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Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 
edited by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain.
Wesleyan, 280 pp., $45, March 1999, 0 8195 2241 4
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... friends                and one woman                who is the Lady                of wherever we                may go. The evident shift in pronoun (what I now mean by ‘we’) is a clear question about place. These lines in ‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’ (from the 1968 collection ...

Get rid of time and everything’s dancing

Patrick McGuinness: Kray Sisters et al, 5 October 2000

The World's Wife 
by Carol Ann Duffy.
Picador, 76 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 9780330372220
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Her Book: Poems 1988-98 
by Jo Shapcott.
Faber, 125 pp., £8.99, October 1999, 0 571 20183 0
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Zero Gravity 
by Gwyneth Lewis.
Bloodaxe, 80 pp., £6.95, June 1998, 1 85224 456 9
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... or Eliot (‘Tiresias’). Duffy’s Mrs Lazarus, an altogether gentler creature than Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’, muses on her husband’s death and her all too brief new life: The last hair on his head floated out from a book. His scent went from the house. The will was read. See, he was vanishing to the small zero held by the gold of my ring. Beckett’s ...

Point of View

Frank Kermode: Atonement by Ian McEwan, 4 October 2001

Atonement 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 372 pp., £16.99, September 2001, 0 224 06252 2
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... a fountain – this in the presence of Robbie Turner, the son of the family’s faithful cleaning lady, who has also been sent, at the expense of the girls’ father, to Cambridge. Robbie did well there, but has now decided to start again and qualify as a doctor – one who ‘would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial ...

Love among the Cheeses

Lidija Haas: Life with Amis and Ayer, 8 September 2011

The House in France: A Memoir 
by Gully Wells.
Bloomsbury, 307 pp., £16.99, June 2011, 978 1 4088 0809 2
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... Hofmannsthal seemed to oppose the match, Dee wrote: ‘Wish somebody would poison that f––ing Lady L. von H … She has just had a baby stuck in her tubes and I wish to god it had popped her off. But modern science has pulled her through and she is sitting around in feathered bed jackets getting in my way.’ Another of his exes published a book, which ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: Grief and the Cameras, 3 December 2009

... programme in which argumentative people seek to broadcast their disputes in front of a wise lady or a baying audience. I’m a Celebrity … Get Me out of Here! will be on later, followed by a documentary about Peter Andre, a previous contestant on I’m a Celebrity who recently split up with the nation’s most frightening glamour girl, Jordan. ITV2 ...

The Family That Slays Together

Deborah Friedell: Lorrie Moore, 19 November 2009

A Gate at the Stairs 
by Lorrie Moore.
Faber, 322 pp., £16.99, October 2009, 978 0 571 19530 5
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... favourite expression, ‘the family that slays together stays together’, was meant in a Lady Macbeth sort of way (previously Tassie had heard ‘sleighs’ for ‘slays’), she’s impressed, and provides a gloss: ‘Where life was meagre, where the tables were only half full, the comic triumph of the poor was the useful demi-lie. Jokes were ...

In Transit

Geoff Dyer: Garry Winogrand, 20 June 2013

... his Lennon glasses and streaming down his face. Still, he is in better shape than the bloodied old lady lying flat out on the sidewalk, one eye swollen shut, while everyone else gets an eyeful of the incident.) We were accustomed to viewing the world through a set of conventional lenses that Winogrand wrenched from our face, making us conscious of how ...

Dressed in Blue Light

Amy Larocca: Gypsy Rose Lee, 11 March 2010

Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee 
by Noralee Frankel.
Oxford, 300 pp., £12.99, June 2009, 978 0 19 536803 1
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Gypsy: The Art of the Tease 
by Rachel Shteir.
Yale, 222 pp., £12.99, March 2009, 978 0 300 12040 0
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... she is all ambition and lies; just as without all the marabou fans, she is just a naked lady with a better than average pair of legs. Frankel’s thoroughness is admirable, considering how difficult Gypsy herself made it to find out the facts of her life. Frankel tells of the dolphin-shaped handles on the basin in Gypsy’s bathroom, the ...

All I Did Was Marry Him

Elaine Showalter: Laura Bush’s Other Life, 6 November 2008

American Wife 
by Curtis Sittenfeld.
Doubleday, 558 pp., £11.99, October 2008, 978 0 385 61674 4
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... book, tracing her fascination to a Vogue profile in June 2001, which stressed the First Lady’s lack of pretension and disdain for fashion, and to a New York Times article in October 2002 that quoted respectful comments by American writers and historians, including Justin Kaplan and David Levering Lewis, who had participated in literary gatherings ...

Agog

Rosemary Hill: Love and madness in 18th century London, 7 October 2004

Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the 18th Century 
by John Brewer.
HarperCollins, 340 pp., £20, March 2004, 9780002571340
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... and a cause of terrible suffering. It preoccupied physicians and the columnists of the Lady’s Magazine in equal proportions.Ray and Hackman, apparently bound together and torn apart by intense and, in Hackman’s case, ultimately ungovernable passion, were a fascinating instance. Both were seen, by many people, as victims: Ray of her ...